Paul Goodman

The Christmas and New Year season is a time for playing Monopoly with your family. But something strange has happened to our set.

The benign and mustachioed elderly gentleman, himself clearly a survivor from the pre-Big Bang age, has vanished from the box.

The top hat, dog, thimble and iron have disappeared from the set of tokens. All that is available are flash motorcycles, fast cars, speed boats and a (clearly private) jet.

Old Kent Road, Trafalgar Square, Mayfair and the rest of the familiar London surroundings have been replaced by such locations as Movie District, Showtime Boulevard and Bling Beach.

Instead of Community Chest, with its grim reminders of the realities of life (paying income tax on compulsion, stumping up fines, or only winning second prize in a beauty contest), there is a "Fortune Series", which includes "Sly Deal! - Steal a property card from a player of your choice".

The rules now explicitly state that "you win when you have £1 million in cash. No need to bankrupt everyone else." But everyone knows that capitalism requires bankruptcies as well as fortunes - and that sometimes the same people enjoy both (though not usually at once).

You can "upgrade your mover to give you a better chance of winning" with a view to "living the high life".

Above all, something worrying has happened to money. The lowest note available is £1 million. Has Mark Carney taken charge of the game and installed nominal GDP targetting?

Oh, hang on. I take it all back. On closer inspection, we've been playing a newer game called Monopoly Millionaire.

None the less, I feel that there is a moral in all this about the banking crisis and the condition of capitalism. I don't like to think what it could be.

I hope the Palestinian developer we met near Ramallah was a Muslim, because this would add an extra dimension to the story I'm about to tell. He is helping to construct a city - the first purpose-built one in part of what I hope will become the state of Palestine - called Rawabi. His Israeli suppliers must sometimes transport their goods to the fledgling city by lorry. A small road through which these big vehicles travel borders a vineyard owned by a local priest who the developer must thus - in his own word - "schmooze". I am taken by the idea of a Muslim developer with Jewish business partners charming a Christian priest in Yiddish.

This tale of civic ambition eased by ethnic co-operation is a by-product of my first visit to Israel and Palestine, courtesy of BICOM. Rawabi is situated where the respective crossroads from Nablus to Ramallah and from Tel Aviv to Amman meet. The country throws up political, economic and cultural highways and byways, and there are many to take. Some are internal: the social protests that saw 300,000 people take to the streets last summer, the dotty destructiveness of its electoral system (pure proportional representation plus no parliamentary constituencies), the jaw-dropping success of its high-tech industries. And some are external: the possibility of Syria's collapse spilling into Israel, the new Salafist terror presence in the Sinai - a danger to Egypt and Israel alike - and, above all, the probability of an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities that could ignite a regional conflict and destabilise the world's economy.

Perhaps I am misreading this morning's reporting of the latest Census findings, but much of it seems to suggest that a growing population is in itself a bad thing. Rising population in a developed country like the UK will indeed bring problems with it if:

Much of the growth is among older people who are not paying taxes themselves but taking taxes from younger ones (though most of these older citizens will previously have been paying taxes themselves, and have attempted to save despite the apparent best efforts of government to discourage them from so doing).

Much of the growth is driven by high and rapid levels of immigration, which are bound both to pressurise public services and strain integration and cohesion - especially if voters haven't endorsed these levels directly, and they are concentrated in particular areas of Britain.

Both of these conditions certainly apply in Britain today. Not much can be done about the growth in older people, and nor should it: it is a good thing to have a generation of older people who live longer and are more fit than the previous generation of older people.

"The most important gap of all, of course, is that between You and the Other, the space where the love exists. Listen carefully one night, as you lie in the dark while your Other is asleep, and you will hear the fizzing of the love in the space between the two of you. If you weren’t separate, if you weren’t distinct, if there wasn’t a gap, then there wouldn’t be a space for love, would there?"

To which one answer is another question: what on earth is going on? What careless or crazed sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph or ConservativeHome has allowed a refugee paragraph from an Iris Murdoch novel to find sanctuary in one of its political columns? Or, worse, has a character from one of those works escaped its pages altogether - some tortured atheist Anglo-Catholic priest or monomaniacal, Plato-fixated Jewish philosopher - to run riot in the sacred spaces where Simon Heffer once trod?

But anyone expecting (or even hoping) that the Telegraph's latest political columnist boasts the overbearing features of Murdoch's John Robert Rozanov or the anguished countenance of her Carel Fisher is in for a disappointment. He is, rather, a short bald statistician from Ayrshire who, with Jay (E), Lynch (A) and Smith (C.C) has written a paper entitled "Bayesian generalised linear mixed effects modelling using Winbugs."

In 2004, I voted reluctantly against civil partnerships (though I was all for equality in relation to life assurance, tax exemptions and so forth) because I was against the state compromising its practice in relation to marriage - in other words, that it takes place between a man and a woman, the usual practice in Europe for a very long time. Whether I was right in believing that civil partnerships have such an effect is debatable. That I am right in asserting that legalising gay marriage would do so is not. Such is David Cameron's intention. "I don't support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative," he said yesterday.

This pleased my old friend Douglas Murray, who mocks other MPs that take a different view. He points out, doubtless correctly, that "few sights in politics are quite as risible as the male politician in full, puffing flight from an issue of basic gay equality". Though I am no longer a politician, he takes an interest in my views - which are now of no public significance - and circumstances. "This time around," he writes, "in opposing the government’s equal-marriage proposals, [Goodman] cites among other things the importance of canvassing Muslim opinion in any plan for equality. To call this disingenuous is to state the situation too generously".

On Friday evening, Twitter was pulsating with messages from those who claimed that the horrific murders in Norway were the work of Islamist terrorists. Yesterday morning, it became evident that the terrorist involved in the horrific attack is almost certainly not an Islamist but a crazed fundamentalist - if not fascist, if not neo-nazi. Whatever the truth may be, it was clear the previous evening that it couldn't possibly be known so quickly, and that those leapfrogging to conclusions on Twitter were out of their reckoning.

Others will soon jump headlong to join them. Just as on Saturday some rushed to claim that Islam caused the killings, others will hurry to assume that the explanation is somehow to be found in Christianity. Yes, both religions have been twisted throughout their ancient history to excuse mass murder. Yes, Islamism poses a terror threat and an integration problem. And yes, so do other extremisms, albeit on a much smaller scale to date. (I have drawn attention to the problem on this site.) We should remember the Admiral Duncan pub bombing in which three people died.

It's late on Sunday afternoon, the men's final has finished at Wimbledon, not a mouse is stirring at Westminster, and I don't feel like writing about politics. But I want to devote a word or two to the expected tweet sent out, at roughly this time each week, by one of the few MPs who understands how to work Twitter properly. Here it is:

Plus somewhere else I can't remember, and can't be bothered to look up.

Anyway, you get the point. So the progressive majority turns out to consist of two English University seats, two Scottish constituencies which - I'm told - contain a large number of students, plus a number of central London boroughs.

Whatever one may say about these places, they aren't typical of the rest of Britain. As the rest of yesterday's referendum results proved. Chris...Vince...What was that you were saying about Britain's progressive majority?

Yesterday, Hamas described Osama Bin Laden as an "Arab holy warrior". And these are the people, remember, who are sometimes sold to us as a bulwark against Al Qaeda.

So I sent out a tweet asking whether their Muslim Brotherhood counterparts in the UK share this view. This upset Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman, who accused me of "guilt by association".

Which is puzzling, because Hasan's no more of a member for the Muslim Brotherhood than I am. I pointed out in reply that I was asking a question, not making a statement, and would be grateful for an answer - from, them, please, not from him.

And today, we have one (spotted by the ever-vigilant Quilliam). Not from any old British Islamist, mark you, but from one of the most senior ones - Kemal Helbaway.

"First of All, I ask Allah to have mercy upon Osama Bin Laden, to treat him generously, to enlighten his grave, and to make him join the prophets, the martyrs, and the good people."

Helbaway then develops his thinking -

"We appreciate him as a rich man living in KSA who left this luxurious life and moved to a hard life in mountains and caves. He helped his Afghan brethrens and participated in Afghan jihad effectively"

"I think that what the Americans claim about September 11th was a trick and a bait they accused Al-Qaeda of. All evidences and indications refer that the Americans are the ones who planned this matter, not the Afghans who have weak resources. The plot of 911 story was not tight. It should be reviewed closely and all parties should be listened to."

Imagine for a moment that while the IRA was still waging its terror campaign, Gerry Adams was discovered to be swanning around inside a specially-built fort in Dublin 4 - a part of the city famous for the wealth of its inhabitants.

The comparison isn't perfect. Adams ended up taking a different path to Bin Laden. For most of "the troubles", he wasn't hiding from the authorities (indeed, for part of it he was elected to the Commons). He was living in Northern Ireland, not the republic. The IRA, unlike Al Qaeda, wasn't an international operation.

One of the curses of British politics is MPs departing for a foreign country for a week, and returning seven days later as instant experts on everything about it. I tried to avoid that trap when writing about Syria on this site almost three years ago, having been there very briefly with other Parliamentarians, and hope that I penned an illusionless account. I drew three main conclusions. First, Syria was in religious terms rather attractive: it remained an outpost of relative toleration in an increasingly fissured region. Second, it was, in political terms extremely unattractive: a one-party state, governed in theory by Baathism and run in practice by an Alawite clan network. Finally, it was best to engage with the regime rather than isolate it, in order to try - without much prospect of success - to wean it away from Iran and towards the west.

It's remarkable that after three months of protests in Syria, attempts by the regime to blame everyone but itself for the unrest, and atrocious responses from the security forces including the recent massacre in Deraa, some commentators are still fascinated by the intentions of the President, Bashar al-Assad. Some view him as a Baathist hardliner, a willing instigator of the slaughter of his own people. Others see him as a potential moderniser, a British-educated ophthalmologist married to a glamorous banker from Acton, who may yet outmanoevre the party nomenclatura. The latter hope that once the protests are ended, al-Assad will be able to persuade Syria's ruling elites that - having established what they'd see as their authority - they have no alternative but to effect political and economic reform.

This, as I say, is remarkable, because it scarcely matters any longer what al-Assad's intentions are. Yes, Syria's religious toleration is worth preserving. And yes again, a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Damascus would be no more respectful of human dignity than this Alawite one. But no, we shouldn't have business as usual with a regime which responds to peaceful protests by shooting civilians. If al-Assad has been unable to persuade his fellow-Baathist family - in particular his brother, Maher al-Assad, who runs the security forces, and his notoriously corrupt cousin, Rami Makhlouf - to throw their weight behind reform to date, it is impossible to believe that he'd be able to do so now (even if he wants to, which is, as we've seen, debatable). Robert Halfon called for action on this site last week.

I list below just a few April Fools from this morning's media. That's to say, I list what appear to be April Fools: one can never be quite sure, and he first day of this month is always an agonising one for editorial judgements. So I apologise, for example, to Iain Dale in the event of his essay on "Roxette and the philosophy of the Joyride" appearing soon on his revived blog.

Anyway, I count in to date -

The Daily Telegraph's scoop in getting hold of Labour's secret plans for Miliband wedding street parties, complete with Tesco-arranged "Ed and Justine bunting" and Asda's talks with the Labour Party about manufacturing "Mini Mili Trifles" – an attempt to outdo Waitrose's Royal Trifle".

Inside Housing's revelation that Grant Shapps is to release a charity CD with the Clash (see picture above). Sources close to the Housing Minister claim that only bit of the piece that's true is that Mick Jones is his cousin.

And, finally - at least for the time being - there's this. That's to say, I presume it's an April Fool. But with the Mayor of London, one can never be quite sure.

Oh, and a footnote. There's confusion among a very, very small minority of readers about the seriousness of our report this morning on Steve Hilton's latest plans. Let's just say that the first ToryDiary draft of the morning bore the headline: "Ultimate modernisation move: David Davis 'considering sex change' ".

First, that it isn't "striking" that anxiety about Muslims in Britain hasn't subsided since 9/11 (given the impact of national and international events).

Second, that polling suggests that one should "be careful about drawing sweeping conclusions without probing all the available evidence". I cited in particular three polls - by ICM, Populus and NOP respectively.

I think Goodwin effectively concedes my first observation. He adds that I side-stepped his point that "not only were some cohesion-based initiatives moving in the right direction, but they were also backed up by decades of academic research". I wrote originally that "it would surely take rather more than 'a decade-long investment in attempting to encourage ‘cohesive' communities' to offset the malign effect [of events at home and abroad]".

Whether pointing out that cohesion initiatives are likely to be so offset is side-stepping his argument is a matter of opinion. For the record, I agree with Goodwin that some cohesion initiatives have been useful, but some have not. In addition, some such initiatives have not been taxpayer-funded, and it would be interesting to know whether studies suggest that these have been any more or less effective than those that were.

Surveys and polling

Goodwin certainly doesn't give ground on this second point. He says that it would be mistaken "to rely heavily on this type of evidence" (polls). This is because "sometimes...they rely on small samples and introduce the risk of over-representing specific types of people". They also "sometimes ask misleading questions and fail to compare groups facing similar situations and grievances".

The nub of his case, however, lies elsewhere. He writes that "most Muslims happily agreed Islam is the most important thing in their life, AND that their primary loyalty rests with the British state, and that they belong to Islam AND Britain. For most, belonging to Islam and belonging to Britain was not a mutually exclusive choice". The source for this claim is our old friend, the Citizenship Survey. According to an analysis of it which he cites, "Religiosity among Muslims neither exacerbates their sense of alienation, nor acts as some kind of "replacement identity".

All this requires close examination. Let's look first at the question of polls and reliability.

Goodwin is doubtless correct to say that polls sometimes ask misleading questions and rely on small samples, and that the Citizenship survey uses measures that are more established and consistent. But it's worth noting that he prefaces what he writes about polls with "sometimes", and doesn't call the provenance of these three particular surveys into question.

It may also be worth noting that he's willing to cite the conclusions of the Populus poll which dovetail with his own. This is the only poll for which I have background information, since it's contained in the relevant Policy Exchange report. Populus conducted "a quantitative study of 1003 Muslims in the UK, through telephone and internet questionnaires".

It also interviewed 40 "semi-structured, hour-long interviews with younger British-born Muslims". The report says that "this smaller sample was not intended to be demographically representative of the entire Muslim population, but it provided useful data about the complex attitudes of younger Muslims. The respondents were either students or graduates, of either Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin.

The Citizenship Survey analysed "the attitudes of over 1700 Muslim respondents". Statisticians will be able to advise whether there's a significant difference between these relatively small numbers (1700 and 1003). Goodwin gives no reason to believe that the one was conducted with greater or less integrity than the other - more "established" and therefore "consistent" though the survey doubtless is.

Now let's turn to Britishness, identity, integration, cohesion and extremism.

In my view, Goodwin's key sentence is "religiosity among Muslims neither exacerbates their sense of alienation, nor acts as some kind of 'replacement identity' ". There's certainly no reason in principle why "religiosity" - the practice of Islam, in this case - should do either of these things. However, the sum of the opinion poll evidence which I cited suggests that in practice it does so in a significant minority of cases. If Goodwin's arguing that these findings have been proved wrong, then I think he's a long way from establishing his case - which, remember, he's asserted strongly in both his articles, particularly the first.

This - to reiterate - is because he's relied to date on a single source, and indeed upon a single interpretation of that source. The poll findings which I referred to dealt with such matters as attitudes to capital punishment for apostasy; women wearing the veil; Muslim women not marrying non-Muslims; Muslim women not marrying without the consent of their guardians; and homosexuality being made illegal. It could perhaps be claimed that I, too, am relying heavily on a single source - but I've two other pieces of evidence to back up my case (as previously outlined).

Furthermore, other findings are available in relation to alienation and replacement identity - namely, the background of people sentenced for Al Qaeda-related terrorist offences. I've looked at some cases on this site, although my sample is admittedly not a scientific one. The Centre for Social Cohesion has published an analysis, which readers can study here. I'm unaware of any convicted terrorist linked to Al Qaeda or similar groups who didn't follow what he believed to be Islam: that what he followed isn't Islam, as traditionally understood and practiced, doesn't remove this element of "religiosity".

Goodwin would surely point out that only a tiny minority of British Muslims support Al Qaeda. I agree: the Populus study found the figure that "admired" AQ to be 7 per cent, and cast doubt on even that percentage when probing its composition. However, this neither indicates that terrorists who claim to act in the name of Islam aren't marked by religiosity, nor rebuts the other sharia-related polling that I refer to above. So where does all this leave Goodwin's claim that "most Muslims happily agreed Islam is the most important thing in their life, AND that their primary loyalty rests with the British state, and that they belong to Islam AND Britain. For most, belonging to Islam and belonging to Britain was not a mutually exclusive choice"?

This question takes us to the heart of the matter. Both Goodwin and the Populus poll agree that most Muslims identify with Britain rather than any other state, and with their fellow citizens rather than their co-religionists abroad. However, the key word here may be "most": according to Populus, the percentage who don't so identify is 31 per cent - nearly a third of respondents. Furthermore, identification with Britain tells us only a limited amount about integration and cohesion. The tests to which Goodwin refers - whether Muslims trust institutions, feel that they belong to Britain, and feel they can influence decisions - reveal little, if anything, about their views on the relationship between sharia and law. The long and short of it is that we don't have very much hard evidence on the matter - and measuring it is surely an important means of also measuring integration and cohesion: one at least as significant, I'd argue, as the tests that he cites.

I appreciate that the highways and byways of this debate are complex. But the main point seems to me to be very simple. Goodwin draws firm conclusions from a single piece of evidence. I prefer to look at a wider range before reaching any at all. Readers will decide for themselves which approach is preferable.

A first-time voter last May would probably have been born in the year that you lost your seat in Bath. This is a reminder that although you're clearly on excellent terms with Downing Street, and have penned some of the most lucid prose about toryism written in modern times, you haven't been an active Conservative for a very long time.

So the few who expect you to arrive in Broadcasting House and begin painting the place bright blue are going to be disappointed. Rather more, I suspect, believe that you'll re-kit it out in pale pink - especially, perhaps, readers of this blog. They see you not so much as a flying buttress of the liberal establishment, supporting it from the outside, as a big stone set in the high altar, at the very heart of the inside of the building.

I hope that both these expectations will be disappointed, and have at least some reason to think that they may be. This is because what seems to me to be integral to you isn't so much a set of political views as a bundle of cultural instincts. How's it best summed up? Perhaps by writing that you'd not only know what "Templum hoc artium et musarum means", but what it signifies.

Goodwin writes that it is "striking" that "anxiety" about Muslims in Britain has not subsided since "the immediate aftermath of 9/11, despite a decade-long investment in attempting to encourage ‘cohesive’ communities".

He also writes that Muslims are "just as likely as others to say they "personally feel a part of British society", with over 90% of Muslims feeling this way". Critics who claim an age or gender imbalance are "ignorant". Claims that Muslims "are more loyal to other Muslims around the world than to fellow British citizens" are "nonsense".